Latest news is that there are a lot of "Denial of Service" attacks going on at the moment, due to vulnerabilities in a popular web gallery script. That may explain why the site has been performing badly lately.

On the other hand, after all the trouble with webhosts we've had lately, I don't know what to believe.

On shared servers, which includes virtual servers, your fate is in the hands of the gods. I've even heard of people with dedicated servers who have a lot of downtime, although I'd like to think that was less common.

When I log in, then go and try to post something, I have to log in again. It only seems to happen once, on that initial attempt to post (or preview a post). Basically, I have to log in twice.

This happens every time I come back to GF. It's not a huge deal, I just have to remember to copy all the text in the response-box area before attempting to submit, log in again when asked, then paste, submit, and it's fine.

Dan, it only seems to happen like this:
I arrive at the site, not logged in. I browse the topics and decide I want to post a reply to something, so I click on the "post reply" button, which then brings up the login page. So I log in, then go back automatically to the previous page and post my response. When I hit send (or preview), the log in page comes back up again.

But if I come to the forum and log in directly, browse the topics and then decide to post, it works fine.

There are two kinds of spam: one is where they have an actual human manually registering the accounts, and the other is where it's fully computerized. We'll always get at least those who are registering manually.

A computer program is able to get and post pages in any pre-programmed order, especially when the message board is a widely known system (phpBB) using standard URL's. It doesn't need much computer intelligence to find out recent topics or topics with certain keywords and so on as they are standard searches.

What is more interesting is how they'd by-pass the word identification screen ('captcha') automatically. I suspect two methods:
1. image recognition software tuned to a particular obfuscation system. These are easier to make than commonly thought using 'learning modes'.
2. a computerized spammer could read the image and send them to a terminal where a very poor freelancer is reading and typing the words in huge batches for one cent an image. The result is sent back online to the spambot who completes the registration and continues spamming the forum.

The only solution in my opinion lies in a more complicated turingtest to identify the category 'bots', including spammers, programs and other hit-and-runs or one-day-flies. An introductory email or post before continuing could work. Or put the registrations in queue and judge by email, selected id and land of origin combination if one is admitted or more identification is asked.

It seems like more work but compared to cleaning up the forum constantly it isn't really. There's no way to win this by automation only.